Francis Alÿs is soon to feature in a new exhibition at Tate Modern. His work, which covers a variety of media, is intriguing to say the least. He lives and works in Mexico City and is represented by David Zwirner, New York, and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich. Alÿs attended the Institute of Architecture in Tournai and the Istituto di Architettura in Venice before moving to Mexico City in 1986 where he started practising as a visual artist. His work encompasses many media often involving the participation and presence of the artist. These performed events are documented in video, photographs, writing, painting, and animation.
In his best-known work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), Francis Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers outside of Lima, Peru. Each person moved a shovel full of sand one step at a time from one side of a dune to the other, and together they moved the entire geographical location of the dune by a few inches. Art critic Jean Fisher writes that “the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth.”
In Tornado, Francis Alÿs is running across a field, chasing a tornado that whirls and whips and plumes into the clear Mexican sky. It is a small tornado, it must be said, but big enough to engulf trees, and any passing Belgian that gets in its path: a storm of dust, stones, clods of earth, straw and animal droppings. The artist pants across the dry earth with his handheld camera and steps right into the the thunderous sizzle and roar, the no-visibility brown-out. Inside the vortex there is a sudden momentary stillness, as he stands in a column of dead air, before being pelted once again by the infernal dust. Time and again he races towards these high-altitude tornadoes before disappearing.
Alÿs is probably best known in the UK for the exhibition he mounted at the National Portrait Gallery last year, of over 200 amateur portraits of Saint Fabiola, collected from auctions and thrift stores, all based on a lost 19th-century original by Jean-Jacques Henner. The collection is still touring the world.
At a recent exhibition one room is entirely dedicated to silence, with rubber tiles deadening the sound of one’s footfalls, each tile decorated with a picture of a finger raised to the lips, like a sign in some old-fashioned library.
Alÿs has lived in Mexico City since the mid 1990s, and many of his works take place in the city’s teeming streets and around the Plaza de la Constitución, a huge paved piazza with a very tall flagpole at its centre. He has shepherded sheep around this flagpole, to the sound of church bells; he has filmed the city’s itinerant workers queuing in its shadow, as it sweeps like a sundial through the long day.
Once, he pushed a large block of ice through the streets, skidding and sliding till all that was left was a dirty pebble melting on the greasy tarmac. Sweating through the streets, you think he might evaporate, too, and that what we are watching is a man performing his own insignificance and futility. But I also imagine his persistence as a walking anecdote: “Did you see that stupid gringo, pushing that block of ice?”
Francis Alys’ art is soon to appear at the Tate Modern. They describe him and his work as so: Walking or strolling is a recurrent theme in Alÿs’s work, which often stems from notes and observations made while wandering around whichever city he is in. The Last Clown features a painterly animation of man going for a walk, along with a set of images which are studies for or details of the film. In total, the installation includes ninety drawings displayed on a glass topped table, and sixteen paintings on old canvases of various sizes propped on a long, narrow, pine shelf. Most of the images exist as pairs, where the picture is repeated with minor variations. This has precedence in a series of paintings Alÿs completed in 1993-4, collectively titled Déjà-vu. That series, also featuring a grey-suited character, was made up of a number of diptychs in which an image was repeated with very slight alterations.
More information on Francis Alys @ The Tate Modern.
Franvis Alys Interview:
Francis Alys Ice:
Francis Alys Railings:
Line BreakAuthor: Andy Ball (215 Articles)
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